The period before the flagship digital currency’s price crash at the beginning of 2018 demonstrates his theory, states economist Joost van de Burgt. He surmised that regardless of the positivity or negativity of the news, the more the number of Bitcoin searches increased, the more the currency gained.

“If the buzz is everywhere, it doesn’t matter exactly what the news is about… nobody wants to miss out and everybody’s trying to get a piece of it,” said van der Burgt.

The economist is not happy with suggested links to the Hyman Minksy theory in which Minsky postulates that an economic bubble goes through five discrete phases; a theory much bandied about during the last global financial crisis. Minsky suggests that the levels of major financial instability follow a displacement, boom, euphoria, profit taking and panic pattern.

The desire to not “miss out”, Minsky suggests is the euphoria stage of the pattern. Van de Burgt disagrees suggesting that Bitcoin’s fluctuation fortunes didn’t constitute a bubble, therefore … “It wasn’t really panic, it was more of a scare,” said the economist.

Van de Burgt suggest that a bubble, followed by a subsequent panic was most likely saved by the introduction of Bitcoin futures, which seems to be indicated by the graph showing little correlation after futures to his Google search theory, arguing “My take on it is that because of the introduction of futures, that might have deflated the bubble before it got to a level where it might burst completely.”

Van de Burgt doesn’t buy into the Minsky theory suggesting it may be a mischaracterization arguing,“Then again, maybe Bitcoin is different than anything we have seen before, and maybe a decade from now its market capitalization will be sky-high as it attains the status of a new global currency.”

The researcher found no Google search correlation with the price of gold and other assets.